Comp struggles with only dx 8 games!! Help

[tdean]

im running xp pro sp1, dx 9.0 on an amd 2500+ barton and asus a7n8x... latest drivers, 1gb of corsair 3200 xms ram.... you get the picture. anyway, im trying to play "no one lives forever" and the framerates are terrible... it hurts my eyes to even play. very choppy and the characters dialog skips, the typing on the screen is not clear etc. i ran the dx diagnostic and it tested dx 7 3d with that spinning cube and it was fine. then dx 8 and the cube barely spun at all, then dx9 was fine. any ideas? this is pretty weird.

....the crows seemed to be calling him, thought caw....

 

[ufo_warviper]

It sounds like mobo/CPU/RAM are all great. Are you by any chance using the onboard video on the Nforce, and what game are yout trying to play. If you lower some settings in game, turn down the resolution some, and turn off Anti-Aliasing and Ansiotropic Filtering on the NForce graphics (if you are using N-Force2 on board graphics) you should be fine. If you are not using the onboard NFOrce Graphics solution, which card are you using currently?

My OS features preemptive multitasking, a fully interactive command line, & support for 640K of RAM!

 

[tdean]

oops... its a geforce 4 ti 6000 or whatever to good one is... i tried lowering all the settings but this runs worse than on my old tbird with a geforce256!!! the game is "no one lives forever"

....the crows seemed to be calling him, thought caw....

 

[CorpusBiscuit]

Is it the first "No One Lives Forever", which came out in 2000 (or was it 1999)? If so could it maybe be an issue with Windows XP? Maybe try running the game in compatibility mode under a different version of Windows.

 

[tdean]

yeah, its the first one. i tried compatibility mode and it never got past the "loading" screen.

....the crows seemed to be calling him, thought caw....

 

[goblinking]

NOLF isn't exactly a demanding game these days... that system should run it fine.

Do you have the latest patch? And does this happen in other similar games as well? Try other Lithtech games if you have any (AvP 2, Tron 2.0, NOLF 2), and let us know what you get.

 

[tdean]

very odd. seems to be lithtech games. although nolf2 is better, it hurts my eyes and gives me a headache when i play it. i have the monitor refresh set to 120, desktop and game at 1024x768 32, and ive tried 16. when i run the dxdiag test, the dx7 and dx9 cubes look perfect, but the dx8 cube flashes and barely turns.

....the crows seemed to be calling him, thought caw....

 

[ufo_warviper]

I've never heard of such a phenomenon. It runs the lower DirectX and the higher DirectX but no the middle one? It almost sounds like a driver issue to me.

My OS features preemptive multitasking, a fully interactive command line, & support for 640K of RAM!

 

[goblinking]

You say you've got DX9... which precise version? What's the version number of d3d.dll? And what video drivers are you using?

One thought, it might be useful to try it with DX8.1 if you can. Or it could be something truly screwed up that would warrant a reinstall of WinXP.

 

[tdean]

"I've never heard of such a phenomenon. It runs the lower DirectX and the higher DirectX but no the middle one?"

that is exqctly correct. and i installed it on a different computer running xp sp1 as well, but without dx9a/b like the other and it runs perfectly. ive tried older unified drivers, and older display drives with out much luck.

....the crows seemed to be calling him, thought caw....